01 20 07 Possible band for band rr

This is a graph of a motif i designed as a possibility for using in a band sampler round robin that i am in. It's not cross stitch, it's not black work, but it is counted work.........lol......of course there will be other elements added(if i do decide to use it) in the blank spaces and i think other stitches besides the straight stitches and half crosses. And naturally the colors are variable. Since this is my own design, it is copyrighted to me but i am giving permission to use it for personal use...as long as the design is credited to me. thanks!

01 20 07 CQ round robin blocks

Here are three unembellished blocks from the CQ round robin I am in ....blocks need to be to the next person by the 1stof February and some folks have already recieved theirs, others are in the process of mailing. Here are the three that i have gotten scans of....i think they are just gorgeous!


Sue T.'s block



Susan N.'s block


Jane C.'s block

01 20 06 Jellyfish

, originally uploaded by glenn..

Check out this jellyfish! Isn;t this amazing! How beautiful. The rest of the photos from this set(on flickr) are just as wonderful. Glenn(who took the photo) really did a wonderful job don;t you think!
ktj

01 16 07 Sandie W-calling all WIPS,FITS,UFO's and WISPS

Sandie is having quite the time being able to post to her blog at all.....and apparently there is no help forthcoming.....sooooo...she is looking around for another blogging venue...in the meantime..keep plugging away and getting those unfinished projects closer to where you want them.........ggggg(i keep thinking someone is going to be shouting..yea, right, the trash can!).....i will try to do a round up for Sandie as soon as i know from her that it is ok...and who all i should be checking....
in the meantime..happy stitching.

ktj

oh, and, on the no new blogger support theme, i am still without the comments capacity on this blog..so if there is anyone who would like to contact me my email address in on the sidebar.........

01 13 07 Herringbone stitch on evenweave

On the cotton block 001 I used herringbone stitch on one corner and it made a pattern that i wanted to play with. i duplicated here and then tried to see how else it would look if it was repeated in more rows. Next i want to try it on plain weave again and perfect some of the spacing . My favorite result is the variegated sample of several rows.

01 13 07-Stitch Practice Chain stitch

here is the chain stitch practice piece finally finished....i started it so long ago that i didn;t know whether to label it under UFO's or not.... but at any rate..here it is.
I call these things stitch practices because i am not really exploring all the variations of a sttich, I am just practicing making the stitch with ONE thread and ONE parameter. In this case it was using DMC 6 stand-one strand and figuring out what that would look like covering a solid area, or making lines....how tight of a curve or a point could i make with this stitch and what adjustments in the sttich would i need to make in order to do what i wanted....now i know! First i drew out the words...Chains of thread and chain stitched the letters..then i kept chain stitching lines with curves and made some shapes. Then I made some more lines within the shapes to make some patterns and started filling in the areas with chain stitch. 99% of the surface on this piece is chain stitch and there is some long and short and satin stitch filling in. I did that not becuase i couldn;t have used the chain stitch but because by this time i was a little tired of doing it.......lol.....you can see how that might happen I am sure.

Next up for my exploration of the chain stitch is to use a larger diameter fiber.I know this will result in open spaces in the stitch unless i pull it tight or make short sttiches so one of the challenges will be to decide to fill in the open space or leave it as is.

Bloggere still has not fixed the comments thing so if you are so inclined...here is my email: katiejayinpaATgmailDOTcom

Seed pods of the Crow's Ash, Teak [flindersia australis]

Seed pods of the Crow's Ash, Teak [flindersia australis], originally uploaded by JIGGS.

01 13 06

One of the things I like to do bvedfore i get going for the day is check out the photos of my contacts on flickr...there are always some amazing images of things...from sttiching to stars...and there is almost always something i find that i want to translate into sttiching in some way. This photo is one of those..not only interesting in it's own right, but also all that texture!

...the photo is from Jiggs' photostream on flickr.

And now that i am awake ....lol......(after a night at the local crisis center) maybe my hands will stop being asleep I can do what i need to do and start sttiching sometime this evening!

ktj

01 09 07 FIT 001 Embroidery Done!

Here it is ! The embroidery is done on this block. i am determined tht i am adding nothing else to it..although i wassssss thinking about beads....lol.....
now all i have to do is make the fabric book and applique this onto the cover. I am vry pleased to have the embroidery done. I had no idea that i would be adding that much to it. I rmemeber the original intention of the cotton blocks was to make them simple and direct. So much for that.





this is a detail of the leaves that i ended up putting in one corner. I worked from a little booklet that showed the closed cretan stitch and used that stitch for them. The lighter green that you see are straight stitches inbetween the legs of the cretan stitch. While doing it all i could think of was that really the closed cretan could just as easily be called an alternating buttonhole stitch.




This is a detail of the heart motif. I added a straight stitch to the lazy daisy vine around the heart and i think it really added a little oomph. I like it quite a bit and am pleased with it!

Happy stitching y'all.

Recipe for Blog Helper Dave!

This is not my recipe but i have made it and it is pretty good!The only thing i changed was the pecans.....i didn;t use them, and i put the filling OVEr the first noodle in the bottom of the pan instead of under it...
Spinach Lasagne with Feta Cheese

Serves 4

Spinach ( Frozen will do)
1/2 teaspoon of grated Nutmeg
Garlic ( 1 large clove, crushed)
1 oz. Pecan Nuts ( grated)
1 1/2 oz. Plain Flour
1 1/2 oz. Butter
1 pint of Milk
Lasagne
Paprika
Pepper
8 oz. of Feta ( crumbled)
Breadcrumbs
1 large Tomato
6 Olives
Olive Oil
1 teaspoon of Mustard

Wash the spinach, don't drain it, and put it in a saucepan together with the
nutmeg, nuts and the crushed garlic. To a second saucepan, add the butter, flour
and the milk and slowly bring to the boil stirring all the time over a low heat.
'Cook the flour out' for at least three minutes then add 6 oz. of the crumbled
feta, the mustard and the pepper. In an ovenproof dish, spread the spinach over
the base and top with the remaining feta. Cover the feta with the lasagne
sheets. Finish off by spreading the Bechamel sauce over the top then sprinkle
with breadcrumbs and the paprika. Arrange the tomato slices, sprinkled with
dried basil and olive oil, over the sauce and add the olives. Bake on the top
shelf of a moderately hot oven ( Gas Mark 6 / 400F / 200 C) for at least 25
minutes. As feta is a salty cheese, there is no need to add more to this recipe.

01 05 07 CQ Round Robin and just stuff

Susan Nixon;s Pink Lady




Seven of us are in a private crazyquilting round robin. Several of us have known each other for years and have done quite a bit of stitching together, and others are newly met friends. One of those newly met friends is Susan Nixon. She has her block all ready to go. It's a lovely block ...don;t know what size it is but I do know that the things you see on it are not attached. They are being auditioned and she will be sending around this block to us completly empty! What this means is that there is going to be room for us to stitch and i can;t wait...the ideas have already begun to flow. I just hope that by the time it gets to me, there will be some space left!

One of the other women in the rr asked what sort of things we were doing....my answer was that i was going to pick the first 20 fabric scraps i had laying around and i would put the first 7 of those that were big enough on a foundation. That will be a far cry from this wonderfully pieced block!


On another note, i have been stitching some on the little FIT block i posted yesterday and have also done more on the one corner with herringbone wide band. If this block were not going to be used on a book cover i think i would bead that seam, but i don't like using beads on things that will see heavy? use.However, I have decided to get out a piece of evenweave and do this band again and see what i can come up with.

And yet again...on yet another note, a friend from Canada (Nikki) and I have been talking about making January our month to celebrate and to share with each other what we are celebrating. I love New Year's for the very reason that it signifies beginning, trying again....and in a sense, a re-committment to values, and value-ing yourself, life, and by extension other's lives and selves.Even though every moment is a beginning, it helps me to have a symbol...it reminds me to live NOW...not to wait till i have "time" not tow ait till i am done with the housework, or wait till i feel better, or wait till......whatever.......but I think it is important to be engaged in the moment you are in....and every moment is NOW....there is no other moment and so....i have realized that i have many things to celebrate just today.
1. I went to the Zen center this morning and recieved instructions on doing chiden in the center. That means that once a week I help take care of the various altars that are in different rooms. Since steps are very difficult for me, another person is also doing chiden for the upstairs altars. They must be dusted, and vessels for offering incense must be sifted and cleaned of debris. The candle holders must be cleaned, pictures dusted and flowers must be refreshed. The altars are different sizes and some are simply small small shelves attached to a wall with a picture, an incense holder, candle and small vase for a single flower and a piece of greenery. There are larger surfaces also that serve as altars and in the Zendo itself there is a beautiful free-standing altar. We learned how to arrange the flowers so that they lean forward in front of the greens that are placed in the vase with them. We also learned placement of various articles on the surfaces and it was all very wonderful to learn. This will be a three month assignment.

I am also celebrating today two rather mundane but related things....one i resisted the very strong urge to go food shopping! I recognized that i would was using it as an excuse to get next to the candy aisle.....oh that chocolate has my name on it!
The other thing i did was COOK! amazing....yes, me, i actually chopped and seasoned food, then put it on a burner....and yes, it was good!Of course it was a simple thing and took all of five minutes to get into the pan......but you know what, for the most part of the last 12 years i considered heating water in the microwave to be cooking.........ggggggg.So who knows, it's January 5th 2007, aqnd if i can repeat this scenario with the food, i just might lose weight and have less pressure on the joints...and feel better too-what could be bad?????

01-03-07 FIT progress and more herringbone

Before I talk about the pics below I want to say that on the Stitching Post blog:

here.

There have been some new posts for the Paisley challenge. Mandy H. has been learning how to wet felt and also free motion embroider...you should see the three paiselies she has come up with. One is a very bright wet felted motif, another piece has two paisely the same done with FME and the third piece used machine stitched paiselies as a repeat on the background and a slipped paisely for the foreground....i won;t spoil it by describing any of them in detail....just go see for yourself! Mandy also has her own blog

here.

Also, try as I may, i cannot seem to get the comments turned back on for the posts....have a post in blogger help about it so maybe it will get figured out. In the meantime, any comments can be directed to me through my email address at the right in the sidebar.

The first pic below shows the further working on the first cotton block i have chosen to work on for Sandie's
UFO challenge.
I have done some work on the motif in the middle adding some running stitches and then some filled lazy-daisies around the circles. I also did some work on the seam with the orange-y flowers but i am not nuts about it and it either needs ripped out(the yellow stitches) or added to. I also added some chain stitch lines around some of the edges which i think adds a certain sense of boundary to it. And, i have been adding another set of wide band border type stitches in the upper left. It is based on the herringbone and is not finished by a long shot. There is a detail of it in the second pic.



This wide band stitched border is based on the herringbone...with some straight stitches at the little crossed intersection and then horizontal straight stitches in between the crossed parts to give it an overall look of being tiled....then i did some fly stitches...to me it makes a great looking lattice just as it is.And I can certainly see filling a larger area with this as an allover pattern. However, i won;t be filling the orange patch with this, but i will be working more on it. Haven;t decided exactly what to do but there will be much more done in the spaces and possibly on the inside edges. Stay tuned...lol......

Herringbone Stitch

Sharon' s Take A Stitch Tuesday has started off with the herringbone stitch and she provided a number of really attractive ways of using this stitch to make combination stitch bands as seam treatments for cq. It is a fortuitoous coiincidence that the first FIT that i have chosen to work on this year as part of Sandie W.'s challenge is a block with a wide band seam treatment made up of stacked herringbone stitch and "embellishers" in the spaces.

The detail is above and the full block it was taken from was posted on Dec 15th.

Stitching on break-pt 4-Blackwork design

I really really liked that snowflake (see previous posts from this evening) and decided I just had to try developing a blackwork band from it. What i came up with is really a border design and i like it very much.I actually charted this one out before trying to stitch it. It takes a lot of concentration!

Stitching On Breaks-pt.3

This is another small piece of Aida that i had in the workbox and i decided after doing the band sampler band that i better practice....this is a sort of design as you go thing(as were the three small motifs on the previous piece). As you can see it's not done but i sure have learned a lot about what NOT to do! The green buttonholing was put around the edge to keep it from unravelling more than it had. It will be taken off when i am done but it did give me ideas for doing other small pieces.More than likely I will make a coaster out of this and keep it as a reminder of all the ways you can mess up something as simple as crossing two pieces of thread in an X .

Stitching on Breaks-pt. 2

I SAID i was going to start on next year's postcards(this year's now.lol) early!
I had a small sqaure of Aida and decided to cross stitch some small motifs to use on the next batch of holiday postcards.

#1 is the first one I did....did the word first and decided it needed a border. Then decided it needed snowflakes.

#2 is what happened when i looked at the snowflakes and wondered what they would look like if they were all in a row.

#3 is what happened when i wanted to use the basic design for the snowflake and see if it would make a good blackwork motif.

What I do on breaks at work-pt.1

Neck Pillow block 3

a number of years ago i put together 3 5 inch blocks in a horizontal row and machine buttonhooled the patches in black thread. My idea was to concentrate on filling each patch with something and not worry about the seam treatments. It got put away and i took it out not more than a couple of weeks ago while rummaging in the FITS drawer....took it to work and have been working on it on the breaks. The other two blocks are fully embroidered but this one is what needed done.




This is a detail iimage of one of the patches...it was so much fun and i consider it the best patch on the block...I took crochet thread and stacked three running stitches and interlaced them..(ala the center of the guilloche stitch-)after that i did buttonholing on the interlaced threads and this is what i came up with.

Band Sampler

This is the band i did for my own sampler....the Stitching Post is doing a band sampler(counted work on even weave) round robin...we each do the first band on our own sampler then pass it on to the next person.....it didn;t take all that long to do but i sure made some mistakes and must have unstitched a section about three times before i finally got the count right.

FITS challenge-project for January

Well, here it is..lol.....the FITS(UFO) project that i am going to finish in January.
I have an odd assortment of smallish cotton blocks that are part way embroidered. This one is actually most of the way embroidered but still needs some work in various areas. I have indicated on the scan where i am going to do the work and after that I am going to turn this block into the cover for a small fabric booklet. Just something with a few pages that i can fill with various things. I want to make so that i can send like a multipaged card of good wishes to a friend of mine. The part that i am committing to for January is to get the front cover done, and then make the booklet itself. The inner pages will be done one at a time as I can....but definitely they will be a priority and probably will end up being the thing i do each month as a ufo.....hopefully it won;t take very many months!

The postcards I made for the swap

Here are the five postcards that i made for the swap...I feel so guilty cause none of them are the caliber of what i recieved. I have one more to do cause i made a mistake and sent one to someone who was not on my list. I don;t want to say which one it was in case she has not recieved it yet. I learned so much making these cards....especially about finishing the edges of them....that is the one part i am very pleased with.

To CrazyquiltingFriends,Learn to Embroider and Stitching Post members

I was working the day Thanksgiving was celebrated in the United States, but that happens to be one holiday that i can celebrate anywhere, no matter what. It's my favorite because it really is about connection.....connection with friends, with family....and with yourself as well......understanding that we are connected by being alive....and if we allow it....we have have much to offer and much to receive....to be simply and deeply grateful is not necessarily a religious idea...all one needs is to recognize that no accomplishment is made individually alone......food is available because others grow it, yet others pick it, and someone else probably packaged it and drove the truck the brought it.....the clothes we wear, the furniture we use is the embodiment of the labor of countless others....and no matter what we subscribe to as the reason for life.....we are in fact connected;it is simply a matter of opening the heart and recognizing that no one succeeds alone..we share the planet and each moment connected to each other.
I would like to take this particular moment to thank the members of the Crazyquiltingfriends list, and the Learn to Embroider list...and the Stitching Post list for being open to the connections that we have made...for whatever reason and on whatever basis. My life is enriched and my heart is glad. So many of us are going through some pretty tough times right now....if not we ourselves, then someone we love dearly.

The CQF is different than the LTE and the Sp lists....having as it's basis the friendship that has formed between a number of people who have known each other quite a while. It is also similar to the LTE and SP in that it opens itself with arms wide to newcomers. On all three of these lists I have met people that care about me and check on me if i am not around.....they try to cheer me up when i am blue and feel bad if i feel bad.....and the same is true in reverse.....there are many many cyber hugs passing back and forth between here (????-where IS here when you are on the internet???) and Australia...and England, and California....and North Carolina....and much appreciation for the willingness to share what we know and love with each other..

To all the members of these three lists.....i wish to thank you for accepting me...for being willing to read posts, put up with my ups and downs and lack of organziation.....i want to thank you for confiding in me when you have...trusting me to care, and caring back.I thank you all for the opportunity to be connected.